Good places to start for a search

These search engines offer suggestions based on your search words. When you put a key word in the search box, these search engines will give recommendations that will help you narrow or expand your search.Ask.com - will narrow or expand your searchYahoo Search - Uses proximity and frequency of search words to find results. Also offers suggestions.

When only reference sites like encyclopedias are required try....Answers.com - All results are reference resources

Other Search Engines and Metasearch Engines

Alltheweb or try Livesearch - Livesearch is great because as you type, the browser creates a list of suggestions. There may be a compatibility issue with older browsers.Clusty - narrows and expands the search much like ask, but tends to give less credible results. See what you think.AltavistaFactbites - "Where the results make sense" This site doesn't allow complex combinations of words.Quintura - Visual search engineDogpile - students pick this because they like the name, also asks "Are you looking for?...."Jux2ixquickithakiExaleadWhonu - "be amazed at what you might find"KartOO - visual metasearch engineKwmap - a keyword map of the whole internetujiko - visual metasearch engineAddictomatic - Amazing search engine that searches news sites, blogs, videos, social bookmarking sites

Directories

Good for "drill down" type searches when you are not sure what you are looking for, information is sorted by "categories" by editors which often make the results more reliable and less commercial.Open Directory Project - the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors.Yahoo DirectoryGoogle DirectoryInfomine - Scholarly ResourcesIntute - Arts and Humanities database

Noodle Tools - Information Literacy: An Overview of Design, Process and Outcomes
This is a "must read" for teachers and librarians. The following is quote from the website:
"Information Literacy shares a fundamental set of core thinking- and problem-solving meta-skills with other disciplines. Authentic cross-disciplinary problems which include observation and inference, analysis of symbols and models, comparison of perspectives, and assessment of the rhetorical context, engage students in developing mastery information literacy over time."

Validating Tools

Look up the domain to see who owns it - http://www.easywhois.com/
Paste URL and see traffic rank, subjective reviews, site statistics, and ownership information http://alexa.com
Find out which websites are on "sponsored search" lists - http://www.overture.com/
The Wayback Machine locates previous versions of webpages - http://www.archive.org/index.php
To find all pages that link to a page you are investigating, type link: in the search bar of Google, AltaVista, Yahoo and paste the URL next to the colon (no space in between). What kind of pages link to this page? What is said about it?
Test reading levels of websites (or documents) - http://www.readability.info/

The Hidden Web

“The Invisible Web” – 60-80% of existing web material

Stuff you can’t get to from search engines

Collection of databases and information sites, arranged by subject, that have been reviewed and assembled by specialists.

You can get to good information by putting the term "databases" next to your search term.

The Internet Public Library - a collection of online resources that are organized by subject, everything from accounting to social sciences, features standard library services such as reference, cataloging, educational outreach, exhibits, government documents, special collections and archives, serials, and online-only services such as a list of blogs. "It can be a great place to start your research as the librarians who created it have spent a great deal of time organizing and finding the best internet resources for your use."

Intute - "Intute is a free online service providing you with access to the very best Web resources for education and research. The service is created by a network of UK universities and partners. Subject specialists select and evaluate the websites in our database and write high quality descriptions of the resources. The database contains 118588 records." (Intute, 2007)